Letter: Students suckered by Ayers’ propaganda

So, William Ayers is “one of the country’s greatest minds when it comes to teaching for democracy and trying to make not only schools and universities but our whole society socially just,” according to Minnesota State University Moorhead professor Steve Grineski.

In 1969, Ayers engaged in vandalism, arson and vicious attacks against police in Chicago as a member of the “Weatherman” group. Their goal was to cause the collapse of the U.S. and to create instead a new communist society over which they themselves would rule. Ayers, along with his now-wife, Bernardine Dohrn, proposed that resisters to this new society should be sent to re-education camps.

Ayers wrote a memoir in 2001, “Fugitive Days,” and recounts his life as a ’60s radical and boasts that he “participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.” The day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers writes in his book, “the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.” In 1974, he co-authored a book titled “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.” This book contains many startling beliefs and was dedicated to anti-American revolutionaries including Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy.

I take an interest in the revelation of his ideology because I followed the many news accounts on television and the newspapers, his run from the FBI, when I was a young mother.

Students at MSUM, you are being suckered. I urge you to peruse his writings and learn how he really wants to make our society “socially just.” He has a history, and it should be revealed and challenged.